Don’t look now, but the PC is the world’s biggest gaming platform

I dare you to think up a better image for a "PC gaming win." (credit: dno1967b / Flickr)

If you follow the business side of the game industry at all, you're probably sick of hearing how mobile gaming is a fast-growing business juggernaut destined to overtake all other forms of digital entertainment (in strict dollars-and-cents terms). It might surprise you to hear that a new report shows the humble PC generated more worldwide gaming revenue than any other segment of the market last year.

SuperData's worldwide digital games market report uses sampled data from tens of millions of gamers as well as publishers, developers, and payment providers themselves, giving us one of the best public estimates of overall spending on downloadable games. The bottom line for 2015: PC gaming is "an undervalued platform... contrary to the amount of attention that is generally paid to mobile gaming, total revenues from the PC gaming market is larger ($32 billion) than that of mobile ($25 billion)."

If anything, SuperData's measurement undersells PC gaming's revenue-generating potential since it doesn't take retail sales into account (while retail sales are a small part of the PC gaming market these days, they're practically nonexistent in the mobile space). For some additional context, the worldwide market for console game software (which is still largely dependent on retail disc sales) was estimated at $25.1 billion, according to a NewZoo report. Even combining three major hardware platforms, console software still can't match the revenue-generating potential of PC games.

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